Microsoft got Motorola's entire range of Android device banned in Germany over age old FAT patent. The banned devices include the Atrix, Razr, and Razr Maxx.

Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, David Howard said, "Today's decision, which follows similar rulings in the U.S. and Germany, is further proof that Motorola Mobility is broadly infringing Microsoft's intellectual property. We will continue to enforce injunctions against Motorola Mobility products in those countries and hope they will join other Android device makers by taking a license to Microsoft's patented inventions."

A report published in the Verge quotes Florian Mueller, an independent blogger who gets paid by Microsoft and Oracle to spin anti-Android stories. Microsoft's paid blogger writes that "In order to enforce the injunction, Microsoft will need to pay a €10 million bond."

The patent in question, EP0618540, is part of Microsoft’s File Allocation Table (FAT), a legacy filesystem that's still widely used, primarily for backward compatibility. It covers long name / short name file indexing, whereby each file has one short and at least one long filename associated with it, giving two-way access to the stored information. The decision is unrelated to the ongoing legal wrangling between the two companies over FRAND licensing for Motorola's H.264 patents.

Oh please, I would absolutely LOVE it if this led Google to abandoning the FAT bull$hit used for sdcards. It is thoroughly unnecessary and ONLY made sense for newbs using UMS for file transfers. Now that wondoze users have been moved to MTP, FAT is no longer required.

Yah, stupid FAT won't die until large companies are hit hard in the pocket book it seems. There are so many alternatives that it is really beyond stupid to keep using FAT.

Not only that, but using a filesystem that supports access controlling permissions would be a FAR better choice for Android. With fat, any application that is granted access to the sdcard is free to mess with data from other applications. Ideally, an everybody writes to sdcard root permission (i.e. group:sdcard rw), and subdirectories owned by particular applications with ugo/rw set by the application that generated the files, and a user-override interface for managing data from misbehaving or removed applications.